This invention relates in general to coking and in particular to a new and useful apparatus and method for dry cooling incandescent coke.
A generically similar method of dry cooling red-hot coke is known from German OS No. 29 52 065 U.S. Pat. No. 4,370,202. That prior art method provides that the sensible heat is transferred from the coke in the cooling chamber partly indirectly through cooling surfaces to a cooling fluid, and partly directly to a gas which is circulated through the hot coke in the direction opposite to the direction in which the coke moves. The method further provides a design of the outer boundary in the upper zone of the cooling chamber and the annular duct through which the cooling gas flows out of the cooling chamber as water cooled walls. The primary goal is to keep the outer wall as cool as possible and to reduce heat losses. In the apparatus provided in that disclosure, the circulated gas flowing out of the coke charge is exhausted through an annular gap about the antechamber. The cross-sectional area of this relatively narrow gap is limited so that also the circulated volume and thus the cooling speed are limited, since the gas velocity must be kept below a certain maximum.
In the meantime, rectangular or square cooling chambers have proved advantageous in the art, for example such as disclosed in German OS No. 30 13 722 U.S. Pat. No. 4,338,161 or German OS No. 31 15 437. This prior art provides an exhaustion of the circulated cooling gas laterally below the charge hole of the antechamber. With such a design, the cross sections of the cooling chamber can be considerably enlarged by increasing the number of the parallel inner cooling walls, thus the number of the individual compartments. Such dry cooling arrangements have substantially proved satisfactory, however, with extremely high outputs, a disadvantageous flow pattern may develop above the cooling walls and in the direction of the waste heat boilers, which may result in a non-uniform cooling of the coke in the cooling chamber.